Third Culture Kids

TCKs are not a band, or a cult or even a restaurant. TCK stands for Third Culture Kid. Kids, usually under twenty-five years old, which have been around the world and can sometimes not know where home is. You know that you are a TCK when someone asks you where you are from and there is more than one reasonable answer.
     Being a TCK has its benefits. It's a bit like air miles, you travel a lot to collect air miles. Eventually when you have enough you can spend them to get flying benefits. Being a TCK is not much different. We 'gain air miles' the more we travel around. We can then ‘redeem’ these to get advantages, which give us a boost in everyday life. There are some pretty interesting statistics involving Third Culture Kids which I am going to walk you through. I think that you may find them interesting and maybe even a little bit exciting (if you are also a fellow TCK of course).
      Divorce rates are significantly lower for TCKs then none TCKs, however TCKs tend to marry older (25 years old give or take).  This could be because of our itch to continuously move from place to place. When participants in study were asked whether or not they would be in the same country in two years, 70% of the people were unsure. However, when asked if they would be in the same place after five years, 92% of the respondents said that they would probably not be in the same country.
       In another study it was found that Third Culture Kids are more tolerant then other people. This does not mean that we will be able to tolerate you if you won’t stop talking about what your cat did last night. No, what it means is that we are more tolerant of different cultures and of people from different backgrounds. Because of this we often find it easier to make a home of a new place and can generally fit in faster than others. But this doesn't mean that we always do this because we necessarily want to. Wenda Sherpad, a teacher which interviewed her TCK students, learned from one of them that they don't always fit it because they want to, but more because it is a necessity to fit in with our surroundings and to make a place seem like home.
        This statistic should come as some good news to some struggling TCKs in school, the average, most common degree which we have is a master degree, but a fair few of us also have bachelor's degree. However, we move around a lot before we get it. 45% of TCKs attend three or more universities before they graduate which for 44% of us will be before we are 22 years old.
       However being a TCK is not all sunshine and rainbows, it has its downsides as well. 90% of TCKs lack a sense of belonging to the places which they move to and often find it hard to become attached to one place. It is because of this that answering the question where are you from? Can be so hard for some of us to do because we generally don't know. It is this that makes some of us so restless to move again and again because we are chasing this seemingly impossible idea of fitting in.
       So, to sum it all up Third Culture Kids have a pretty confusing life but it all works out in the end. We either have many homes or have no home at all. There are currently 220 million TCKs at moment and that number is only growing. TCKs are the people of the future.